In Dot Time, It’s ‘Zobrad Past Bosco’

If you have a minute or two, time being relative, I thought I’d explain the universe to you. I’ve been reading Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” and it turns out that the universe is the wackiest place in the entire, well, you know, anywhere.

It certainly had a wild enough start. It began at a time when all the matter in existence was compressed into one little spot that weighed quadrillions of tons, or as we used to say on the playground, infinity tons times two. Nobody knows how this happened, although God must have had one heavy-duty Trash Compactor. You couldn’t actually see this dot, since it had zero size. Still, we can imagine it as being wedge-shaped and with a crust, since the only thing with a similar density today is authentic New York style cheesecake.

Einstein once said that “God does not play dice with the universe,” but apparently God does play with firecrackers, because one day He blew that little dot up. All of the matter in that one little spot was blown out in every direction, and is in fact still being blown outward today. God must have been playing with at least a cherry bomb if not an M-80.

This was called the Big Bang, and within a few hours of it, we had ourselves an expanding universe full of helium and various clouds of junk. In the ensuing ten or twenty thousand million years, not much has happened except those big clouds of gas began to coalesce and form galaxies, stars, planets and even, as unlikely as this may sound, Regis Philbin.

To me, that all makes perfect sense, although it doesn’t account for the presence of Yanni. Where it starts to get strange is in the concept of time. Remember when I said there was a time when all of the matter in the universe was compressed to a dot? Well, technically, there wasn’t. Time had not been invented yet. If you were inside that dot, and trust me, you were, and you asked somebody what time it was, they would have laughed at you and said, “It’s Zobrod past Bosco,” and you could do nothing but sit there and brood over how many smart-alecks could be crammed inside a dot with zero space. The point is, time had no meaning until God made that momentous announcement, “OK, I now declare it to be the First Day,” and then lit that cherry bomb.

So this Big Bang kicked off both time and space, which turn out to be practically the same thing. I don’t know why people have trouble with this. We deal in time-space every day when somebody says, “How far away are you from Seattle?,” and we say, “Oh, four-and-a-half hours.”

In reality, it’s a lot more complicated than that, since both time and space are relative. For instance, if my teenaged son is driving I can get to Seattle in far less than four hours, although in accordance with Einstein’s theory of relativity, I will have actually aged several years.

This is not as strange as some of the other implications of modern physics, for instance, the idea that space-time is curved or warped. Very few people in the world can fully grasp this concept, and one of them, Rod Serling, is dead.

Curved space-time adds a tantalizing possibility to our view of the universe. It means that time and space and the whole universe could be curved around on each other like a big globe, meaning that we can sail around and around it forever and never reach the edge. This is, of course, beyond our puny capacity to comprehend. On the other hand, the idea that there is an edge is equally beyond our puny capacity to comprehend. (What would be on the other side? Idaho?)

To understand any of this, you must have a firm grasp of quantum mechanics. I feel thoroughly qualified to explain this subject to the layperson: Quantum mechanics governs the behavior of the tiniest particles of atoms and waves, thus the very structure and behavior of the universe, and nobody except Stephen Hawking understands how, but if you’re not Stephen Hawking, then it’s OK to just trust him on this.

Quantum mechanics allows Hawking and other smart people to figure out what’s going to happen to the universe in the future. They have it narrowed down to two possibilities: It will just keep expanding forever, monotonously, or the whole thing will finally stop expanding and crash in upon itself. At which point, it will become a little dot again and we’ll be back to wondering what “Zopbrod minus Bosco” is supposed to mean.

Even Hawking can’t answer the big questions, though. Why did God decide to kick-start the universe, besides just for fun? Does He do this often? How many universes have there been? Have they all been so nutty?

I certainly hope so. Nothing would be more awful than a mundane universe.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review